Now I'm at a loss, how did you successfully create a pool of DBI handles with multiple children? I have a pool set, but as soon as my first child ends, DBI tries to clean itself up and kills all my other DBI handles with "end-of-file on communication channel during global destruction" error.

My code (trimmed down):

my %pool;
my %dbhs;

$MAX = 5;

$pm->run_on_start(\&_child_start);
$pm->run_on_finish(\&_child_finish);

my @dbhs = start_dbh();
   %pool = map { $_ => 1 } @dbhs;

foreach $i ( @is ) {
  ($next) = grep ( defined($pool{$_}), @dbhs );
  $pid = $pm->start($next) and next;
  
  $sys->set_dbh($dbhs{$next});
  sleep(rand(10));
  $pm->finish;
}

sub start_dbh() {
  %dbhs = map {
               $_ => DBI::Connect();
             } 0 .. $MAX;

  return keys %dbhs;
}

Sys::set_dbh() {
  my $this = shift;
  $this->{'_dbh-child'} = shift;
}

sub _child_start() {
 my ($pid, $ident) = @_;
 delete($pool{$ident});
 print "**** STARTED: child with PID $pid";
}

sub _child_finish(){
  my ($pid, $exit, $ident) = @_;
  print "**** FINISHED: child with PID $pid exit cide $exit";
  $pool{$ident} = 1;
}
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And as soon as the first child dies all my DBI handlers spew out: DBD::Oracle::db DESTROY failed: ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel (DBD Error: OCISessionEnd) during global destruction.